Suzanne Rheinstein's City Escape

A Los Angeles decorator creates a serene New York retreat for her family

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Suzanne Rheinstein's new book, At Home: A Style for Today with Things from the Past, showcases the way several families live in two separate abodes with largely different styles. But she almost didn't make it into her own book. Rheinstein, the acclaimed Los Angeles–based designer and proprietor of Hollyhock, lives in a Georgian house in the Hancock Park neighborhood, and had for decades pined for a proper Manhattan apartment. When her daughter, Kate, who lives in New York, got married and grandchildren seemed likely (now there are two), Suzanne's husband, Fred, finally relented. He also found the perfect spot.

The apartment, a light-filled corner space on the Upper East Side, is half of a former duplex—the grand, public half. That means it has a living room of abundant dimension rare in a one-bedroom, as well as a library, bedroom, and master bath. She has imbued it with a markedly different look from her West Coast residence. "We adore our house in L.A.," she says. "It's very forgiving and full of wonderful family treasures. But for New York, I wanted something a little more city, a little more stylized. And I wanted the palette to be a little more calm."

To that end, she employed soothing grays and creams and taupes and soft, greeny blues, including the many fabrics she chose from her own line for Lee Jofa. Some, like the damask on a pair of vintage wingback chairs, are used on the wrong side "to keep them from being too out-there," she explains. There's color, she adds, but "it's just very offbeat, like the pale ochre pillow on the chaise, or the velvet on the pair of stools—I don't even know what you'd call that."

The sense of calm is further enhanced by the walls. In the library they're covered in her own French Paisley, which is also used on the Syrie Maugham sofa. "I've always loved those French rooms where everything is done in the same fabric," she says. "It makes the room enveloping without being 'cozy,' if you know what I mean." When she realized that the living room's windows, beams, and alcoves would make it difficult to hang art, she hired Bob Christian, an artist and decorative painter who is a frequent collaborator, to create a subtly gorgeous mural that surrounds the room. The overall effect is one of shimmering, very chic, but ultimately low-key big-city glamour. Think The Thin Man if Nick and Nora had owned a remarkable collection of 18th- and 19th-century French and Italian antiques. And there are indeed a few homages to the great decorators of the movie's era. The Maugham sofa, for example, shares space with a chair from the Tony Duquette estate covered in Rheinstein's Elsie fabric—her valentine to Elsie de Wolfe—near an ottoman designed by the great Rose Cumming.

Rheinstein has created such an oasis that daughter Kate jokes her mother is "the only person I know who comes to New York to relax." But the space is also very much about living. "A lot of people just want a pied-à-terre as a place to sleep," Rheinstein says. "But Fred really wanted us to be able to see our friends—and feed them." So there's a generous round table in one corner of the living room, as well as an expandable 18th-century French table behind the sofa—"I can seat people there, and set up buffets, and it's great for projects too."

She bleached that table so it would be lighter than the other desk in the room and jokes that she'll "probably go to decorating hell" for it. But she has never minded the unexpected. Above the period French mantels, rather than the usual mirror or painting, she has placed the wood pieces she adores—a chimera in the living room ("A lot of the paint has come off—it's perfection") and carved fronds in the library ("I love fragments").

For his part, Fred loves multitasking on the living room's round table, where he sets up his laptop with one eye on the big flat-screen TV visible through the library doors. The couple plays dominoes ("We are big games people," Suzanne says) and dines there, which is always a slightly formal affair, even when it's just the two of them. The shallow closet in the hallway is full of treasures that Suzanne says she "cherry-picked" from the L.A. house. "It's not like at home, where you eat in all the time so you never use all your special things."

Despite the apartment's refined look, there are plenty of places to sprawl, and both sofas are lavish enough for a grown man to take a nap on. "It's very comfortable," Rheinstein says. "That's the number one thing I wanted to do for my husband—and for myself."